Prateek Saxena is a co-founder of Zilliqa and an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. He co-authored a paper on sharding that was later used as the foundation for the Zilliqa blockchain. ^[1]

Education

Saxena received his Master's in Computer Science from Stony Brook University in 2007. In 2012, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Ph.D in Computer Science. ^[1]

Career

After graduation, Saxena became an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore's School of Computing. In 2016, he identified critical shortcomings in existing blockchain networks: slow transaction processing, limited scalability, and security compromises. To address this, Saxena and Loi Luu co-authored a paper titled "Elastico," exploring how sharding from database architecture could enhance blockchain scalability. ^[1][2]

Following the paper's publication, he co-founded Anquan Capital with Max Kantelia to develop this concept further, while Luu launched Kyber Network, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange. Despite promising applications across finance, e-commerce, and manufacturing, Anquan realized the necessity for a scalable blockchain platform. Consequently, they decided to create their public blockchain project, Zilliqa, which launched on June 1, 2017. ^[2]